


Hold Me Fast and Fear Me Not

by Neelh



Category: Gravity Falls
Genre: Autistic Pines Family, Ballad 39: Tam Lin, Gen, Sidhe, The Power Of Mabel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-31
Updated: 2016-10-31
Packaged: 2018-08-28 07:00:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 18,461
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8435992
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Neelh/pseuds/Neelh
Summary: When Mabel Pines goes to Gravity Falls with her brother Dipper, she doesn't expect to find a six-fingered man in the woods.
He doesn't expect to become her friend.





	

**Author's Note:**

> content warnings for gideon gleeful and mentions of transphobia, death by faerie sacrifice and/or immolation, and divorce
> 
> this is a fic based on the centuries-old child ballad on saving someone you love from the faerie queen before it's too late

The first time that she journeyed into the woods, Mabel Pines was not alone.

Mabel breathed in the fresh air of the forest, then glanced quickly to her brother. He was walking straight ahead through the woods; twigs snapping under his feet and squelching into damp rotting leaves. She followed him with a smile, skipping and narrowly avoiding tripping over old tree roots.

It was rather fun to be breaking the rules. Grunkle Stan had said something about people going missing between the trees, but like that would stop the Pines twins! Or, well, mostly Dipper, but Grunkle Stan said lots of things and he ran a tourist trap and mysterious disappearances sound more like a pretend mystery that isn’t real. But Dipper wanted to investigate it, and Mabel was tagging along because Grunkle Stan’s Mystery Shack smelt kind of musty and weird, while the forest smelt like dirt and flowers and burnt toast with honey on top, which was an improvement.

“Wait up!” called Mabel as a springy branch whipped her in the face.

She heard Dipper turn around in the thick underbrush. “Why are you so _slow_ , Mabel?”

“You’re the one who usually complains about _me_ walking too fast,” she replied. “I was just enjoying the sights! How are you gonna find anything if you just run around like a dying wasp?”

“Well, the best adventures come when you’re not looking for them,” Dipper snorted as Mabel caught up with him.

She blinked. “We are literally looking for adventure right now.”

Dipper stopped in his tracks before staring at Mabel with eyes as wide as saucers, or maybe the average candy jar. Is there an average candy jar? Before Mabel could think about that too much, Dipper spoke in a hushed tone.

“I’m never going to have an adventure,” he murmured.

That was exactly the mood most protagonists of her favourite books start before getting an adventure! Therefore, it should follow that if someone doesn’t think they will have an adventure, an adventure should follow.

Mabel knows. She has Mabel-Sense. She _knows_.

Well, there was only one way to go about the situation, and that was to have fun!

“I’ll race you to that log,” Mabel said, pointing nowhere in particular.

Dipper noticed her clear lack of direction and sighed, “Mabel, there isn’t a-“

“Blalala I’m winning!” she shouted back, skipping over an exceptionally large root.

Smiling slightly, Dipper began to jog alongside her. “I’m just gonna have to run with you until we find a log, aren’t I?”

“That’s the idea!” Mabel grinned.

They raced each other through the forest; sometimes stopping to help the other along and never really taking it seriously. It wasn’t until Dipper had to use his inhaler that Mabel drew to a halt in a clearing with him and guided him to sit down on a mossy log.

The colours were different in the clearing from the edges of the forest. The greens were tinted with blues and purples, making them glimmer teal in the dappled white sunlight, and the bark of the trees were more intricately patterned than before, in precise lines that switched between rigid and curved whimsically. On each and every plant, the leaves seemed to have their veins traced with platinum ink that shimmered every time a non-existent breeze fluttered through them.

It felt wrong, somehow, as she stepped on the thick turquoise grass cautiously, like she was going into a stranger’s bedroom as they slept. Which would be creepy.

But the clearing also felt like a unicorn or a fairy should live there, and that thought was enough to make Mabel bounce on her toes as her brother slid off the log and approached her.

“Does this place feel weird to you?” he asked, reaching out for her hand.

Mabel squeezed his hand in return “Sure! Wanna stay here and see what happens?”

Dipper sighed and smiled. “Definitely.”

They sat for a while, cross-legged with their backs resting against the log.

Nothing changed.

Mabel glanced over to Dipper, who was staring at the trees.

“Do you think anything’s gonna happen?” she asked.

Dipper shrugged in response, then added, “I just feel really anxious. Do you think we should go?”

Mabel let out a laugh and stood, stretching. “I know what’ll cheer you up!”

Groaning, her brother replied, “No, Mabel, please not with the-“

“Flower crowns!”

Mabel searched the forest floor before finding some weird like of flower that had three little petals and three big petals, mostly in purple but with little yellow splotches in the middle of the big petals.

“Bro-bro, look at these!” she laughed, before plucking one from the ground. “Look at how weird it is! I love it!”

Dipper didn’t reply. He just stared at a spot just behind Mabel’s shoulder when she turned to face him.

“Hey, Dippin’ dots, you doing okay there? Because it kind of looks like you’ve seen a ghost,” she said, smiling awkwardly. “Look at this weird flower! You like weird things, right?”

“ _How dare you_ ,” a baritone voice rumbled from behind her head.

Mabel’s eyes widened, and the flower dropped to the ground at her feet. She shuffled around slowly, feeling the stare of something much larger than herself over her head, like some huge monument or tree or something, but moving and talking which isn’t really normal for real-life trees, probably, but if those flowers were there what else could be?

When she finally looked up at the being, all she could see was pale skin tinted green-grey, and thick brown hair, and eyes full of fury. It wore rags of varying shades of brown and it was _scary_.

“I’m sorry!” she yelped. “We’re just gonna go!”

“You will go nowhere until you explain why you are in these woods without permission! This is not your place, human children!”

Dipper stood in front of Mabel with trembling legs. “I wanted to explore!” he said. “So if you have something to say or do because we trespassed in a public space, then leave my sister out of it!”

The being seemed to shrink then. He, or it, but it looked like a he, still looked the same, but instead of like a tree, he seemed more like a weird guy who didn’t leave the house much. “Sorry, but are you two from around Gravity Falls?”

“We came here for the summer!” Mabel shouted.

“Don’t tell him that,” hissed Dipper. “He might want to, I don’t know, stalk and eat us!”

The being raised an eyebrow with a sceptical expression. “I don’t really want to eat you. It would probably be acceptable payment, though.”

“Acceptable?” shrieked Dipper. “And payment? What the heck is _up_ with this place?”

“This is the land of the sídhe,” the possibly-man, possibly-monstery-thing said, his voice low. “None may pass through these woods without leaving a toll to those of us who cannot leave. And you have not only come by without, to my great knowledge, but you have stolen from us.”

“You mean the flower?” Mabel asked, her voice high.

“Yes, the iris sibirica. It belonged to us, but you took it. You must pay for that,” he said. “That, and for your continued passage through these woods.”

Dipper glanced at Mabel. “Do you have any money?”

“Nope. Do you?”

“Nope.”

“Are we-?”

“I-“

“You needn’t pay with money,” the being, possibly-man, possibly-monster, most-likely-sídhe said. “Human currency is useless to the fae. We require things of beauty, or of great value to the mortals who gave them.”

“Is this a kidnapping situation?” asked Dipper, raising an eyebrow. “Because we don’t live here and it would be pretty difficult for our Grunkle to explain to our parents why we’re not coming home. Especially since he doesn’t know that we’re here.”

“And my sweaters may be beautiful, but I really like this one!” Mabel added.

The sídhe’s eyes widened. “No! The legends weren’t very clear, but I can take something metaphysical instead of clothing or your actual bodies. That would be weird.”

“Meta-what-ical?” said Mabel, scowling a little at the sídhe’s fast way of talking. It didn’t leave a lot of time to process what he’s said properly and interject with her questions at inappropriate times.

“Metaphysical,” Dipper replied automatically. “Something that is real, but not a physical object.”

Mabel grinned. “So like, love and memories and farts?”

“Um, kind of?” Dipper replied, before looking up at the sídhe. “Are farts metaphysical?”

“No, they’re physical,” the sídhe replied. “Probably. They’re made up of gas, so, ah-“

The sídhe cut himself off, shaking his head almost imperceptibly, and Mabel noticed how quiet and still the forest was.

“What’s wrong?” Mabel asked, cocking her head to the side in the way that always got her questions answered by her parents and strangers alike.

“Well, there’s no point in me explaining anything,” he said calmly, as if discussing the weather, “since I’m going to take the memories from one of you after I escort you back to your house.”

“What?” Dipper and Mabel shouted at the same time.

The sídhe ran his hands through his fluffy brown hair. “Well, it does seem to be the most efficient way of working things out. One of you will forget that you had ever set foot in this forest, and the other will know to stay away.”

“Wait, you’re going to just take all of the memories away from one of us?” Dipper asked. “Because if you are, do it to me. I learn quickly, and Mabel’s more important anyway.”

“No, take my memories!” Mabel interrupted, pushing Dipper behind her. “I just knit and get crushes on boys!”

The sídhe silenced them both with a raised hand, and Mabel saw that he had six fingers. “I’ll choose when we get to the outskirts of the forest, now please be quiet. It is dangerous for humans here, and I cannot promise that you will leave unharmed.”

He began to walk out of the clearing, and Mabel tugged on Dipper’s arm to get him to move.

“How can we trust this guy?” Dipper hissed. “He just threatened us and he’s going to steal our memories!”

“He talked to us about farts, Dipper, I’m sure he’s not all bad.” Mabel waved her free hand that wasn’t holding onto Dipper as though she was wafting away a bad smell. There wasn’t a bad smell, though. The forest smelt like wood and roses and snack bars at school discos. It was weird, but nice. Well, it would probably be nicer if neither of them was going to suffer from some kind of personality death from memory loss, but Mabel was good at making the best of a bad situation! Like the time that Dipper’s bullies were being extra-really-meaniepants-bad so Mabel suffocated them all to death with the contents of her yarn bag! Or maybe that was a really weird dream. Mabel kind of hoped it was. Her parents said that murder is bad or something.

Dipper and Mabel followed the sídhe through the forest on a thoroughly unfamiliar path, but then again, Mabel had no idea which way she and Dipper had gone through the woods into the clearing. They could be retracing their steps to the inch, for all Mabel knew.

“You live in the town, correct?” the sídhe asked, not looking at either of them.

“We live at 618, Gopher Road!” replied Mabel, grinning. “Well, actually, we live in Piedmont, but we’re staying at the Mystery Shack for the summer!”

“Mabel, this is literally some kind of supernatural forest creature with unknown motivations and powers, so maybe don’t tell him our entire life stories?” Dipper hissed through his gritted teeth.

“My brother’s a paranoid nerd,” Mabel said, winking at the sídhe.

“Intelligent, paranoid people do not do well in this town,” the sídhe replied, still not looking at either of them. A moment later, he quietly added, “Especially those with an insatiable curiosity.”

Dipper didn’t hear, and Mabel decided that some people said weird personal things sometimes without thinking when they felt sad or something, so if she kept her memories, she would come back and help that guy sort through his weird personal sadness things! If she lost her memories, though, the sídhe would be stuck without any Mabel fixing powers to help fix him.

So maybe it’s for the better when she woke up in her bed the next morning, completely aware of the fae in the woods.

 

-

 

Dipper stretched and swung his legs out of bed, and Mabel looked up from her knitting to say, “Good morning, nerd!”

He didn’t notice her slight tremble, or the fact that the size of the sweater she was knitting was far too large for her to fit into.

Dipper smiled back, rubbing sleep from his eyes. “Morning, dumbface.”

“Kids!” called Grunkle Stan from downstairs. “I made food but I’m too lazy to take it off the stove!”

Dipper blinked at Mabel, and she was once again reminded of the fact that he had no idea as to what happened on that day in the forest. His eyes were still betraying his mild boredom with this summer vacation.

“Is he going to burn our food?” she asked.

Snorting, Dipper replied, “If it’s even our food. D’you want to go down and see if he made us breakfast, and if he didn’t, do you want to eat his?”

“It’ll need more sprinkles,” Mabel mused.

“Come on and flip the darn pancakes, kids!”

Looking at her brother, Mabel saw the exact same thought process going through Dipper’s head as the ideas surfacing in her own mind.

“Coming!” they both yelled, thundering towards the door.

The pancakes needed a lot of syrup to taste nice, and Grunkle Stan said that the weird grey hairs that apparently came from his shoulders were what made Stancakes special, so Dipper dissected his pancakes with a look of mild fear while Mabel coughed up a sparkly hairball. Grunkle Stan ate his like a normal person, though, and then let Mabel and Dipper put on blindfolds and get into his car.

That was a weird day out with the bearded old man in the death machine cryptid robot, but at the end they bonded as a family, and Soos was there too. Mabel doesn’t think he’s ever further than twenty metres from Grunkle Stan at any point, which is adorable and kind of like a puppy!

Soos didn’t look like a puppy, though. He was really tall and looked kind of like a weird baby, but he was still really nice and owned a boat for some reason!

At the same time, the guy looked at Stan adoringly, and vaguely implied occasionally that he wanted to be adopted by Grunkle Stan. That would take a lot of paperwork, Mabel knew, because rearranging families was stressful and took time and lawyers and your parents pretended to be getting along just fine but they really weren’t, or it all wouldn’t be happening in the first place.

_Anyways_.

And as Mabel kept going on strange adventures with Dipper, such as the Wax Figure Incident where the murderers of the wax figure turned out to be other wax figures, she kept on adding them to her scrapbook as she knitted a large maroon sweater. Even as Dipper bonded with Soos and Wendy, who had apparently punched almost every single gnome in the forest because they tried to date and kidnap her, Mabel worked her knitting magic.

She had something important to do.

 

-

 

The second time that Mabel went into the woods, she was alone.

She didn’t take any care in following the exact same path into the woods that she took with Dipper, but Mabel wasn’t giving up. This forest was weird, and the sídhe nerd would probably find her anyway. Especially if she kept calling out for _Mister Sídhe Nerd Guy_. Or another faerie could capture her and take her to him. Either way, she’d probably be able to give him the sweater and share her summer memories so far with him.

Eventually, a hand fell on her shoulder. Mabel jolted, then glanced out of the corner of her eye.

Six fingers. It was him.

She turned around, a huge smile on her face, and the sídhe smiled back. His expression was guarded, but she could see the affection beneath it! Grunkle Stan had looked like that after her’s and Dipper’s and Soos’s monster-hunt thing

“Hi!”

The sídhe had an expression that Mabel couldn’t quite place.

“Why did you return?” he asked.

Well, _that_ wasn’t very welcoming!

“Because you looked lonely and I wanted to hang out with you! Plus you kind of said that you couldn’t leave so I figured you’d want to know about the town,” Mabel replied, removing and opening her backpack.

He stared with his strange green-tinted eyes as she pulled out the first item and thrust it into his arms with a curtsey.

“Wha-“ he stuttered, looking at the bundle of woven wool in his arms.

“I made you a sweater!” grinned Mabel. “It’s in exchange for being allowed in these woods and hanging out with you!”

“I suppose that is appropriate,” the sídhe mused, rubbing the maroon yarn between his index fingers and thumbs. “I… I suppose that you can stay.”

“Great!” she replied, smiling broadly. “I’m Mabel Pines, it’s nice to meet you!”

The sídhe froze. He didn’t move for so long that Mabel had to poke him to make sure that his soul hadn’t left his body or anything. When he flinched, she sighed in relief.

“Names hold power here,” he said quietly. “Do not tell anyone else in this forest what you are called. I am known as Six-Fingers to those who dwell here.”

Mabel laughed. “Because of your fingers? That’s so cool! My brother’s called Dipper because of his birthmark, because it’s shaped like the Big Dipper! It’s my favourite constellation!”

“Actually, the Big Dipper is an asterism!” Six-Fingers replied quickly, a smile appearing on his face like a switch had been flicked from moody to excited. “It’s made up of the brightest group of stars in the constellation Ursa Major!”

“I barely understand that,” she said, and Six-Finger’s face fell into an expression of disappointment. “But it sounds interesting! Can you tell me more about it, and I’ll show you what’s happened so far this summer?”

“Of course!” Six-Fingers looked happy again, and Mabel prepared herself for a nerdy lecture like when Dipper started talking about his mystery novels, but then again, he’d listen to her talking about Dream Boy High when she wanted to, so that was a pretty good exchange.

The sídhe spoke about a lot of things besides the difference between asterisms and constellations, and at some point they had moved on to psuedosciences and zodiac signs. He seemed to hate horoscopes, but on the other hand he knew every story about the constellations that made the star signs. He got all sad over Gemini, but then she asked him about Virgo, which was her sign, and that story was sad too, but not as sad as Gemini’s.

Then Mabel brought out her scrapbook, and when she opened it to the first page with the picture of her and Dipper and Grunkle Stan and the macaroni interpretation of her confusion and happiness at being somewhere new, Six-Fingers snatched it away from her and pushed his face really close against it. She couldn’t see what his expression was like, because his brownish-grey hair covered his face with the angle he was leaning at, so she waited patiently for him to stop muttering weird muttery gibberish at the paper.

After two minutes, it became unbearable.

“What’s up with the picture?” Mabel asked, prodding Six-Fingers’s shoulder.

He jolted up; his green eyes wild and wide, before glancing down at Mabel and relaxing. “The man, he looked familiar,” he said, looking back down at the page. “What’s his name?”

“Aren’t names all mysteriously powerful here?” she challenged.

Six-Fingers smiled, running his fingers across the dried glue of her scrapbook’s macaroni face.  “I suppose so. Nonetheless, could I please have a nickname of some kind? I know him, I promise. He comes through these woods sometimes.”

Mabel stared at the sídhe. Dipper was right about the fact that she didn’t know this guy, but there was something in him that felt familiar, somehow. He was really nice, but he might end up being really mean like the kids at school who pretended to be Dipper’s friend and then got all that information about him and it took ages to stop everyone in school from calling him by his old name.

“Stan,” she said. “He’s my Great-Uncle Stan, but we call him a Grunkle for short because time is money and we shouldn’t waste time.”

Snorting through his nose in quiet amusement, Six-Fingers muttered something like “Sounds like Stan, alright.”

He turned the page, and soon Mabel was engrossed in telling him all of her stories about the summer so far, like the Gobblewonker that Old Man Mcgucket built, and the small group of gnomes that built a cult around Wendy due to her immense strength and nonchalant attitude. Six-Fingers told her to focus on her friends, and to not forget about her life outside the forest, and Mabel laughed since just because she was friends with him didn’t mean she didn’t have other friends. But yeah, she had kind of been neglecting humans to make that guy happy, so if her being around more people would make him happy, she’d do that.

Sometimes he would mention little facts about the town and the people there, especially Grunkle Stan, but Mabel didn’t question his knowledge as he walked her back to the Mystery Shack a few hours later. Everyone in town knew that Grunkle Stan was weirdly obsessed with money! And they also probably all knew about his criminal record, but nobody really cared. So would it really be too far-fetched for a sídhe guy who lived in the woods to know about that stuff?

Dipper would have said _probably_ , but at the same time, there was a sídhe guy who lives in the woods. Frankly, he could have been several gnomes in a tattered old trenchcoat and Mabel would still have trusted him, but Six-Fingers didn’t seem to have any bruises anywhere, and Wendy punched hard. So nah, probably not gnomes. Definitely a sídhe, whatever that was.

She would wonder what a sídhe was, but wondering was pretty pointless when she could just _ask_.

“Six-Fingers, what _is_ a sídhe?” she asked.

This time, his eyes didn’t light up with the excitement of sharing knowledge that he usually got. Instead he looked, well, kind of _sad_. But after a moment, his face broke out into a little smile, and he began to explain.

“Well, the proper term is Aos Sí, which translates from Gaelic to _people of the mound_ ,” said Six-Fingers. “I suppose that the best way to describe the sídhe would be as something akin to faeries-”

“You’re a _faerie_?” Mabel screeched.

Six-Fingers flinched. “Well, no-“

“But if you’re a faerie why are you a boy?” she continued, still bouncing with excitement. She froze suddenly, and added, “Wait, _no_?”

“No, I’m not, and you’re wrong about a lot of things,” said Six-Fingers. “Damned simplification by people who don’t know what they’re messing with.”

Mabel walked beside Six-Fingers, her little legs pattering twice as quickly over the rotting leaves as the sídhe left the magical parts of the forest with long strides. “Messing with? What’s wrong with faerie stuff?”

“First, please stop calling them faeries, they find it rather offensive. Those that dwell here, though not exactly fitting human definitions of the Aos Sí, do prefer to be called sídhe. It is much more polite to refer to these creatures as the Fair Folk, or _fae_ occasionally,” he explained, his voice lower than before. “Second, the Fair Folk are, well, not entirely fair. Or rather, they are very fair. If you are dealing with one, almost anything could be defined as a favour or trade, and if the rules are not understood in the same way by both parties, things can tend to get a little, ah, _messy_.”

Mabel’s brows furrowed. “How messy are we talking? Because if you mean glitter everywhere, then that’s how I live my life.”

“They have my body and soul,” said Six-Fingers matter-of-factly. “Well, we’re at your house now. Go inside, child.”

Mabel stepped out of the forest and glanced over her shoulder to say goodbye to the sídhe.

He was gone.

She hoped he liked his new sweater.

 

-

 

Candy and Grenda were really really cool and so was Waddles! She’d obtained her pet pig at a fair that Grunkle Stan had thrown in the area next to the Mystery Shack and a little bit away from the forest after some time travel shenanigans with Dipper, and she got two new best friends who lived in Gravity Falls because they came to a party where she also met a girl called Pacifica who was definitely nice but didn’t want to show it for some reason.

She was getting loads of callouses on her fingers from knitting so many sweaters, because she needed at least one new one every day, but also she needed to make some for Six-Fingers and some for Grunkle Stan and some for Dipper and loads for Candy and Grenda because they complimented her sweaters and now she had a matching sweater for all of her family and friends!

Dipper was getting better at having friends too, which was good. Wendy had punched someone who had called him a girl, so Mabel knew that she could trust the redhead with her brother, even if Wendy didn’t return Dipper’s romancey-kissy feelings.

She was a cool person, either way, and occasionally took Dipper and Mabel into the woods to look for more weird stuff like the gnomes. She even left little trinkets on an old stump covered in teal moss for the fae, to the twins’ surprise. Well, mostly to Dipper’s, but Mabel thought it was weird that she didn’t go and find a sídhe and give it to them in person.

Whenever Dipper and Wendy were in the forest with Mabel, they always said something about how creepy it was, and that it felt like something was watching them, but then they were always distracted by a new weird creature that would scurry along harmlessly, occasionally stopping to be petted or, on some occasions, hold a conversation. Afterwards, Mabel would see a glint of burgundy in with the green, and she knew it was Six-Fingers.

He spoke to her about the creatures when she went to the forest at night, and read about them from one of two big red book with his handprint on the front in gold foil. Funnily enough, the two books were labelled as the second and third books, and Six-Fingers never said anything about the first one.

Mabel returned home as the sun was setting to see Grunkle Stan leaving the Shack and carrying a battered black leather satchel. She froze next to a tree, barely breathing as she watched him look around like he was about to eat the last cookie.

They both made eye contact.

“Mabel, what the he- _heck_ are you doing out here?” Grunkle Stan shouted, walking over to her. “I told you to stay out of the forest! It’s dangerous, and I don’t know what I’d do of you got hurt!”

“Yeah, well from here it looked like you were gonna go in there!” she replied. “That’s hypocritical of you!”

She had learnt that word from Six-Fingers. Actually, she’d learnt it from Dipper, but Six-Fingers explained the definition because when Dipper had called her that he had gone on in a huff because she was teasing him about Wendy.

Grunkle Stan shook his head. “I’m an adult, Mabel. I can do things that you can’t, like _go into the deep, dark forest where people go missing_.”

“What if _you_ go missing?” asked Mabel, putting on her sweetest face. “What would me and Dipper do if _you_ got hurt?”

“Soos would take care of ya and send you home,” he replied, clutching the strap of his bag. “Actually, scratch that, _Wendy_ would take care of you.”

“Wendy lets us go in the forest!” Mabel pouted. “She leaves a toll for the fae and everything!”

Grunkle Stan spluttered. “She- You know what? We’re going home. Neither of us is going into the forest.”

Mabel smiled. “That’s okay with me!”

As Mabel looked back, such had become custom for her in the forest, she glimpsed Six-Fingers watching her and Grunkle Stan, his expression unclear. He didn’t leave until they were inside, and Mabel looked through the window to see the trees standing emptily.

 

-

 

Dipper thrust his plastic sword at the Summerween Trickster, aiming for its popato chisp kidneys. His attack did nothing, however, against the huge monster made of candy. Mabel was just hoping that he could get Soos out of its stomach though, like the grandma in Little Red Riding Hood, and they could deal with the giant candy monster later.

She was trying to figure out a way to get Soos back when Candy flew over her head like a cannonball while Grenda bellowed a wordless war cry. The Summerween Trickster got a small hole through its neck-torso bit, and even though it still sealed up a few seconds later, it was all Mabel needed to increase her determination.

“I will fight you to get Soos back!” she screamed, grabbing a hanging skeleton decoration and swinging it around by the ankle. When she had developed enough momentum, she flung it upwards, and slashed the Trickster up its body.

Soos fell out, his mouth full of liquorice.

“Ew, you like that stuff?” ribbed Mabel, leaning away from the gross, gross candy.

Soos nodded wisely. “In the hands of masters, even the worst things can become beautiful.”

“Is that a quote from some kind of ancient Buddhist monk?” Dipper asked, waving his sword around and coincidentally whacking the Trickster in the candy hand.

Chucking, Soos said, “Nah, dude, it’s a Soos original!”

“You are wise, Doctor Soos,” said Mabel, nodding solemnly.

“That doesn’t matter!” Grenda shouted. “It’s trying to eat Candy!”

“Isn’t that cannibalism, dawg?” Soos asked Mabel.

Dipper shook his head. “No, it’s Candy! Mabel’s friend!”

The Summerween Trickster was holding Candy in its hand, its great maw gaping like a toothy fish as it held Candy over its mouth.

“I wrestled a seagull once,” shouted Mabel, “and I won! Hyaah!”

She leapt at the Trickster and landed on its knee before clambering up like on the climbing frames in the park. Along the way, she took fistfuls of loser candy and tossed it down below, to be eaten by a waiting Soos.

At some point, her grappling hands brushed against her friends’ hands and her brother’s, and together they tore apart the monster. That little kid that the Summerween Trickster ate earlier fell out of its oozing sherbet body, covered in decades-old melted white chocolate.

Mabel plucked a piece of candy corn that used to be a tooth and hummed in newfound appreciation of the weird gross texture.

Huh, this still tasted nice enough with all the sugar.

She was going to get _so sick_!

But as she helped to carry the remains of the Summerween Trickster to Soos’s truck, something grabbed her arm and snatched her away. She tried to scream, but it was as though her throat had been turned into a pillow or some other kind of muffley thing.

Though she could not have been further than a few yards away from her family and friends, Mabel knew in an instant that she and the thing were alone. When she blinked, she could see a green-tinged humanoid with skin that draped over its body like a dress, but her mind was screaming at her that it wasn’t _real_.

“Hello, Mabel Pines,” the creature – a sídhe, definitely – said in a voice that was not a voice, but more like an intonation.

“How do you know my name?” asked Mabel, clutching her bag of candy to her chest.

“We of the forest have known about you for some time,” it replied.

She pulled at the sleeve of her plain red sweater. “Speaking of the forest, I thought that you guys couldn’t leave.”

The sídhe laughed, and Mabel couldn’t find any emotions in the sound, but it did not feel empty. It did not feel as though she was being mocked, or demeaned, or if she was simply a source of humour for the fae, but at the same time there was no joy or bitterness. “The sídhe are free to roam this world as much as you humans are allowed in ours.”

“But Six-Fingers-“

“Six-Fingers,” the sídhe said, “is not one of us.”

Mabel blinked. “Then what is he?”

The sídhe shrugged. “You humans would not understand. He is like our guard dog; a pet or our servant. He has been given a portion of the forest to live in. It even overlooks his old home. But thirty years ago, he called himself a prisoner.”

“What did he do?” blurted Mabel. “He didn’t do anything wrong, right? He can’t have, he’s my friend!”

“He trespassed, and he gave himself to the forest. He is ours now.”

She shook her head, pulling on her sweater’s hem this time. “Why are you telling me this?”

Like a butterfly opening its wings, the sídhe spread its arms. “Our Queen has a plan. It would be prudent of you to visit Six-Fingers tomorrow. You can bring some of that candy, too. Save the jellybeans.”

“But-“

“Fare thee well, Mabel Pines. We will be waiting. And tell him to not repeat the mistakes of Tam Lin.”

The world flickered, and the sídhe was gone for a moment, before something incomprehensible appeared in a flicker for a millisecond and said, “Watch out for the boy, Mabel Pines. He is not dangerous to anyone but you.”

“Hey, Mabel!” Dipper called. “Are you up for cheap horror or do you want to stick with the vaguely spooky movies when we get home?”

Mabel hurried to Soos’s truck and jumped in beside Dipper. “Either’s good,” she said. “I don’t really mind.”

 

-

 

The twelfth time that she went into the forest, it was two in the morning of June the twenty-fourth and Mabel had not slept at all.

She carried nothing but her candy stash, shivering in her nightdress and wishing that she had put one of her sweaters on. Thankfully, she hadn’t forgotten her shoes, though they were rather uncomfortable without socks, and also pretty cold too.

“Six-Fingers!” she called, once she had reached the clearing and clambered onto the log. “It’s me, Mabel!”

“How many times have I told you not to use your real name, kid?” his voice replied, echoing from everywhere at once through the vibrant green trees.

“Twice,” she replied. “The other times were you asking me how many times you’ve told me.”

A pause followed where Mabel knew that if he were in his physical form at that moment, Six-Fingers would be pinching his nose and trying not to sigh.

“Can you come and sit down next to me?” she asked.

“Of course, dear,” replied Six-Fingers, sounding faintly fond. The forest trees cracked and bent, before straightening up to allow Six-Fingers to walk to Mabel, wearing his trenchcoat over a black Mabel Original turtleneck depicting the moon landing, but with extra space cats and puppies. Mabel had watched the moon landing in school with Dipper, and the lack of space cats, puppies, or aliens, or alien space puppy-kitten hybrids had been highly disappointing, and when she’d said that, Six-Fingers had smiled, his unguarded eyes crinkling and deepening the crow’s feet that decorated both sides of his face between his eyes and temples.

Mabel grinned as he approached, but her face fell when she remembered why she had come to the woods. She kind of wished that the Summerween Trickster was the weirdest thing that she saw today. Yesterday? time was weird in the early hours of the morning, or the very late hours of night, Mabel supposed.

“What’s wrong?” Six-Fingers questioned, settling down next to her. “Here, take my coat, you must be cold.”

Mabel set the bag filled with her candy stash on his knee as he wrapped his trenchcoat around her shoulders. “This in exchange for your protection in these woods, to borrow your coat, and for you to answer my questions.”

For a moment, Six-Fingers looked taken aback. He settled back into his usual demeanour a moment later and peered inside the bag before his face brightened like a child on his birthday. “Jellybeans? That’s definitely worth at least five hours of what you ask!”

“Who is Tam Lin?” asked Mabel, sitting cross-legged and facing Six-Fingers.

He raised his eyebrows and for a moment he looked like a startled owl, before he replied, “Well, Tam Lin was an old border ballad from Britain. That, ah, it means that it was developed initially around the border of England and Scotland. It was collected by Robert Child and is known as the thirty-ninth Child Ballad.”

“Cool!” she beamed. “Can you sing it for me?”

Six-Fingers was looking surprised a lot today. Tonight. Whatever. Nevertheless, he smiled, cleared his throat, and said, “Well, I can’t really say no to you, can I?”

After a moment, he opened his mouth, and a gentle baritone voice began to fill the clearing.

“ _I forbid you maidens all_

_Who wear gold in your long hair_

_To come or go by Carterhaugh_

_For young Tam Lin lives there_ ”

By the second verse, Mabel had begun to drum on her legs to help keep a steady rhythm, and by the eighth, Six-Fingers had begun to gesture with his hands with every note that left his mouth in a clear darkness of a tale.

When he had finished, Mabel applauded, then asked, “So Janet saved Tam Lin by hugging him? That’s so awesome!”

“I suppose that she did,” replied Six-Fingers. “That is the one part of the story that remains true, though interpretations can differ between retellings.” At Mabel’s blank expression, he added, “Different people think it means different things, and that shows up in how those people sing it.”

Mabel shifted to swing her legs over the side of the log. “How do you interpret it?”

Six-Fingers mirrors her position, but his feet touch the ground instead of hanging freely. “I think that Tam Lin never wanted anything that happened to him. I think that he was passive, because that’s all that he could be, and I think that he loved Janet more than anything the fae could offer him.”

There was a moment of silence between them, broken by the distant hoots of owls and the strange noises of the forest’s residents.

“One of the sídhe told me to deliver a message to you,” murmured Mabel, leaning against Six-Fingers’s shoulder. “They said to not repeat Tam Lin’s mistakes.”

Six-Fingers stiffened. “It would be prudent for the sídhe to realise that I do not, and will never, experience romantic attraction,” he hissed through gritted teeth. Then, in a slightly more normal voice, he continued, “Did they know anything else?”

“They said that you weren’t a sídhe, and that the queen has a plan, and that you like jellybeans,” Mabel said. “Also, they know my name.”

Six-Fingers stood, almost toppling Mabel over, but caught her before she could fall. He lifted her off the log and settled her on her feet.

“I will guide you home, child, but never come back to this place,” he said, looming over her like the first time that they had met. “Please, just forget that I ever existed, and you won’t get hurt.”

“I don’t understand,” Mabel whispered. “Why? Who’s going to hurt me?”

“I don’t know, but please stay away from here. The tithe is real, and if my suspicions are true… Go home, dear.”

He took her hand and began to walk through the forest, leaving her bag of candy behind. He did not speak as he left her at the edge of the forest near the Mystery Shack, or even as he drew his coat from her shoulders, leaving her exposed to the early morning chill.

Even before she looked back, Mabel knew that Six-Fingers had disappeared. She still couldn’t stop herself from sparing a final glance before heading inside.

 

-

 

The Mystery Shack had been so normal since Mabel had been banned from visiting the forest. Even Dipper seemed more bored and sad than usual, though that might have been because Wendy barely spoke to them anymore. When she did, it was just for simple stuff, like asking for help in the gift shop. She was doing her work a lot more, though, so at least Mabel could be near to her physically if not emotionally.

Soos had found a weird hidden door in the Shack while he was cleaning, and while Grunkle Stan had said it was nothing weird, he’d said something similar about the wax museum, and that ended with several murders of the cursed, easily-melted kind.

The weird thing about the room wasn’t the glass pyramids or strange crystal bottles left lying around everywhere, or even the body-switching shag carpeting that Dipper and Mabel had accidentally set off before switching back into their own bodies as soon as they could, but rather a photograph in a simple wooden frame that had been placed picture-first down on a side table. Everyone had ignored it, since it mostly blended into the dust on the table, but Mabel had never been one for letting silly inconsequential things go uninvestigated if they caught her interest.

So, when Grunkle Stan had left the room and Dipper began to roll the carpet up to prevent any further mishaps, Mabel picked up the picture.

At first, it just looked like a family picture with a young Grunkle Stan. His father looked mean and wore dark glasses, while his mother looked nicer and also kind of pointy, but she had really cool hair that probably distracted most from her sad, weary eyes.

Grunkle Stan looked weird. His hair was fluffier, and he was wearing a neat-looking sweater vest paired with a pale green shirt. His smile was nervous but excited as he looked at the camera, his six-fingered hand held in a wave. He’d changed a lot since he was a kid. This probably would have been just after high school-

Wait. Six fingers?

She went back and counted them, and there they were. Five fingers and one thumb.

Now that she looked again, she could see more differences. The man in the photograph had a soft cleft chin, and he seemed to be more evenly built than Grunkle Stan’s hulking, top-heavy figure.

If his hair was longer, and his cleft chin more pronounced, which would probably come with age, and if he had no glasses, which would probably come with losing his own, he could almost look like…

“Six-Fingers,” Mabel breathed.

Dipper grunted as he hoisted the carpet against the wall. “Huh?”

“Nothing!” grinned Mabel. “I’m definitely not acting suspicious in any way, shape, or form! I’ll be in our bedroom, so don’t come in for about an hour. I will definitely not be trying to analyse what might prove everything we’ve seen in Gravity Falls be a complete lie.”

“Have fun?” Dipper said as she left the room. “I guess?”

Mabel didn’t listen to him as she went to their room and grabbed the nearest knitting project. It was supposed to be a sweater for Six-Fingers, but she supposed that she wouldn’t really be able to give it to him.

Nevertheless, she continued to knit the red wool into the well-practised shape that would feel like a fluffy sweater cuddle on a man much bigger than her as she tried to figure out what was happening with her life.

So, Six-Fingers wasn’t a sídhe. He was a human, with human parents and a human life and a human bedroom in her Grunkle Stan’s house. It was the latter part that was the most confusing. Why did Grunkle Stan have that picture? Why was the room locked away? Did Grunkle Stan do something to trap Six-Fingers amongst the fae?

Mabel hoped not. Grunkle Stan was weird and smelly, but he loved her and Dipper and he’d be silly about showing it but he showed it nonetheless.

But why was he about to go into the forest that one night? Was it because of Six-Fingers? And if it was, then how? And why?

Mabel dropped a stitch and groaned before fixing it. Now the sweater was a little lumpy. At least nobody would be wearing it.

She’d get to bond with her other friends more, and go out to the town more and meet new people, but she already missed the quiet ethereality of the forest. It was, well, not exactly peaceful, but new, and Six-Fingers was there and he was nice even when he thought that she was being silly, which wasn’t often because he was just as silly when he was happy.

But he’d spoken about Tam Lin. He’d told her about a man that got stolen away by the sídhe and was brought back to the human world by someone who loved him. There had to be more to the story! It couldn’t end with the man in the forest without anyone else, and a girl who saw the fair folk, who spoke to them, who dealt with their prisoner, it couldn’t end with the girl just going back to her old life.

She would have to go to the library.

 

-

 

The Gravity Falls Public Library was rather familiar to Mabel, seeing as it had been necessary in her and Dipper’s quest to find the real founder of Gravity Falls. It was organised much more simply than the one at home, without all of those weird numbers and stuff that Dipper understood but didn’t really help her to find the books on cute vampires.

Thankfully, there was a bookcase overflowing with battered books, and above it was a helpful sign that read FAIRYS. It might not have been respectful to the amoral creatures that lived on the outskirts of the town, but it was definitely helpful.

Mabel approached the bookcase and scanned every book on the bottom shelf. Those books were mostly for little children, and a disordered row of books from the _Colourful Rituals_ series. The second shelf was filled with similar books, but the third had had a thick tome labelled _The Ballads of Robert Child_ , with various sheets of paper sticking out of it.

Using all of her strength, Mabel yanked the book out from the packed shelf, making the sides of the bookcase creak as it adjusted to its new shape. The book was heavy, and Mabel staggered as she carried it to the nearest table. It was set down with a _thunk_ that echoed in the nearly-empty library. Unperturbed, Mabel clambered into a chair and opened the book at a random page.

The ballad wasn’t Tam Lin but something about a fish and a worm, though that wasn’t what made Mabel stop. Familiar handwriting had etched out the words _The Faerie Oak of Corriewater_ , and underneath a poem was written.

It seemed to just detail a hot guy being taken by another Faerie Queen for his looks, but then it devolved into some kind of platonic Christian version of Tam Lin, which would be useful were it not for the religious overtones of a faith that the Pines family weren’t exactly a part of. The boy transformed in his sister’s arms into a bull and a river, but when he became a burning fire, the girl dropped him and screamed while the fae court jeered. They told her that she could have freed her brother if she had kissed him as a simple act of platonic love, and the girl burnt to death.

Mabel shuddered. Would Janet have burnt to death? Was there some kind of difference between family love and smooch-date love in the eyes of the fae? It was all so confusing, and all Six-Fingers had told her was to leave and never return.

She couldn’t stop trying to help him, though. If the sídhe owned him, then they probably knew his name. That was what made Six-Fingers so scared, Mabel thought, because they knew her name. But she hadn’t given it to the sídhe, she’d given it to their servant; another human. Well, kind of a human. He was still faintly tinted green, like he was covered in a little filter, but that didn’t matter. What did matter was somehow figuring out what happened.

“Well, if it ain’t the forest kid!” a familiar accented voice cried out from right behind Mabel. She jumped as Old Man McGucket’s bearded face swooped around, grinning. His breath was awful! From the look of his teeth, he probably didn’t care much for dental hygiene.

“Forest kid?” asked Mabel, leaning away from his wall-eyed stare.

The old man nodded, jumping onto the table and crouching down so he was at eye level with her. “Sure! Ya have the smell of the forest around you! It’s weird, like those little candy shrimp.”

Well, he did have an unusually large nose. Maybe that was why he could smell so well.

“What do you want?” she asked, pulling the book towards her chest.

“I’m lookin’ for a thing to help me find a thing,” he said. “The faeries stole it thirty-odd years ago, and I’ve been a-scratchin’ at m’ brain to try and find it again!”

“The sídhe stole something from me, too,” replied Mabel quietly. “He gave himself to them, so I’m going to get him back.”

Old Man McGucket continued grinning in his uncomfortable way. “So you call ‘em all the sídhe, huh? I used to know a guy who did that! Or, at least I think so. My mind’s not what it used to be, y’know! At least I’ve still got me old robot-buildin’ hands!”

Someone else who called them sídhe? Something stolen thirty years ago? Six-Fingers was old, sure, but he only looked to be in his forties, and the fashion in the photograph was from the seventies. Mabel could tell these things. So maybe the sídhe could stop time? It would make sense. If the boy, Six-Fingers, in the photograph was in his late teens in the seventies, he could have spent a decade making friends before being taken by the fae. It was a slim chance, but it could be possible.

Mabel lived for possibilities.

“The guy you knew, did he have six fingers?” she asked.

“Sure did!” he replied, chipper as the morning sunrise. “He was always into these anomalies, like the Murder Hut has!”

“The Mystery Shack, you mean?” Mabel offered, but Old Man McGucket ignored her.

“He’d always be researchin’, and… No… _No_!”

McGucket began to scream, thrashing over the table. Mabel’s eyes widened in confusion and fear, and all she could do was take her book and run away.

It was useful information, she supposed, but Old Man McGucket was literally insane. He was desperate for attention, with all the death robots and stuff, but at the same time he seemed to genuinely believe what he was saying. Maybe. It was hard to tell.

But if he was telling the truth and he really knew Six-Fingers, then maybe Mabel could help everyone and save her friend. Nobody would be left behind for a sídhe sacrifice or anything.

Holy heck they were going to sacrifice Six-Fingers.

That’s what the sídhe had meant when they had told Mabel about Tam Lin. The flowers and the friendship; it was all a parallel thingy. They were going to _hurt_ him.

On the night of Halloween. It would take until October. Mabel… Mabel could manage that.

She could work with that.

She exhaled slowly. This would be difficult.

 

-

 

A week passed.

Grunkle Stan had praised her for stealing a book from the library, though he seemed a little wary of her choice. He and Dipper had gone to do manly things, like chopping firewood, while Mabel looked at the various loose sheets of paper all throughout the book, even the one written in Latin that said _Mind_ on the top.

She had opened the door, since nobody else was able to and it could be one of her friends, but instead it was a pudgy boy in a blue suit and a bolo tie. His white hair was huge, and it looked so soft.

“Hello,” he said, smiling charmingly. “My name is Gideon Gleeful, and I saw you at the library a few days ago. Your sweater was so glittery, I just knew I had to meet you. You see, I also have a taste for the sparklier things in life.”

“Same!” beamed Mabel. “Oh my gosh, I love glitter! And I love your weird little tie thing! What kind of rock is it?”

“Ah, just a trinket,” Gideon replied. “Though it could be turquoise. It took a lot of digging around for me to find it.”

“Everything worth anything needs to be looked for, especially in vintage clothing stores’ bargain bins,” Mabel said sagely.

“I couldn’t agree more. Say, would you like to join me for a makeover?” Gideon asked.

This was the little brother Mabel had always wanted. He liked glitter. And clothes. And _makeovers_.

“Yes,” she said, eyes shining. “Yes I would.”

And for the first few days, it was fine. Gideon was her friend and they hung out, though he always called Grunkle Stan “Stanford Pines” and kind of glared at him a lot. The townspeople seemed to love Gideon, even though he didn’t really do much except for looking cute, but that was kind of like Mabel with Waddles, she supposed. Gideon even had that little cute turned-up snout like Waddles!

“Tell me, Mabel,” he said one day as the two of them sat on a roof, enjoying the view. “Do you like fairy tales?”

Mabel figured that since Gideon was ten, he probably meant more Cinderella and less kidnapping and human sacrifice. “Of course!” she said, trying to ignore the sudden reminder of her captive friend.

Gideon smiled. “Do you believe in magic?”

The trees spoke and the wind sang. The world was different, and sometimes Six-Fingers would say something completely off-putting about demons and fear. The sídhe spoke to her; told her that the boy was not dangerous to anyone but herself.

“Yeah, why?” she shrugged.

Gideon’s smile widened, and Mabel felt her stomach drop. He clutched the gem around his throat and began to glow faintly teal. When Mabel looked down at her hands, she saw that the same thing was happening to her as her feet left the ground.

She looked up at Gideon, trying to flinch back, but she was helpless. He had complete control over her movements and his own, and his smile…

It was like he didn’t care! He just looked at her hungrily, like when Grunkle Stan counted money, and she had never related to Benjamin Franklin’s printed, flimsy face more.

They floated above the town together, and Gideon held her hand with his own free one. He pulled her over the forest, and she caught a distant glimpse of an empty clearing with sparkling Persian-green grass.

Gideon landed on the outskirts of the forest, half a mile or so away from the town.

“I’m not like everyone else, Mabel,” he whispered. “I can do things that they can’t. I know things that they don’t. I will have power that their puny minds will never be able to comprehend.”

“What do you mean?” Mabel’s voice trembled, even as she tried to project an aura of cool bravery like Wendy.

“I mean that we can take over this town, together,” Gideon said. He was still floating, despite the fact that he had relinquished his hold on Mabel, possibly to make himself look taller. “There are strange things here. Stranger than y’all could ever imagine! And I know everything about them. I can force them to bend to my will and harness their power for our own ends! We can rule as King and Queen, Mabel! Be mine! Be mine, and never leave my side!”

Mabel stared.

This wasn’t her ideal little brother. This would be hilarious if she didn’t know that he didn’t bluff.

How the heck did she get into this situation?

She opened her mouth to decline, but then paused. Gideon had some kind of telekinetic amulet and what seemed to be a very strong crush on her. He could be like Alison Gross and turn her into some kind of worm! The Sídhe Queen wouldn’t save Mabel, though, not without something in return. Those ballads tended to be of varying degrees of accuracy.

“I’ll think about it,” she blurted.

Think about it? That’s, like, the ultimate way of saying no! It was going to be so obvious that she wanted to get away from him, and his amulet could probably crush her bones, and she was already trying to save Six-Fingers; she couldn’t work on so much at once! He was going to kill her, wasn’t he? Or kidnap her? Or-

Gideon floated down, pouting, but to her unending relief, he said, “Okay, my darlin’! I trust that you won’t make the wrong choice.”

As he walked her back home, Mabel could barely converse with him, and couldn’t duck out of the way or anything when he kissed her cheek.

She was in really deep trouble now. But she had time to figure out some kind of plan, so that had to be enough.

That should have been the end of that, but when she opened the door to the Shack, Grunkle Stan and Dipper were waiting.

“Are you okay?” Dipper asked, and she was about to shrug off his question when she realised that she was shaking.

“Gideon has a magical amulet,” she choked out. “I don’t know how much he knows about the weird stuff in town, but he said that it was a lot, and I’m scared, Dipper!”

Grunkle Stan snorted. “Gideon doesn’t have a magical amulet, Mabel. What did he do to make you think that he did?”

“Levitated us both,” she whimpered. “Flew us around the forest.”

“Are you sure that there weren’t any helicopters or wires?” he grunted, leading her and Dipper into the kitchen. He sat her down at the kitchen table on one of the hard chairs that felt more like stone than wood.

“No. It was completely silent and I was glowing green and I _couldn’t move_.”

Mabel began to sob, her shoulders shaking and her cheeks flushed with humiliation. Stan wouldn’t believe her. He never believed anything about magic. If she told him about Six-Fingers, he’d probably take her to a psychiatrist or something. He might do that anyway.

Dipper’s arms wrapped around her as Grunkle Stan said in a vaguely soft voice, “Hey, Mabel, sweetie? It’s okay. I believe you.”

Mabel opened her eyes to see Grunkle Stan’s blurry form kneeling in front of her. She blinked until he came into focus, then asked with a shaking voice, “Really?”

“Really, Mabel,” he said. “I’ve never trusted that kid. He always seemed weird. Did he, um… Did he do anything else?”

Mabel flinched, and Dipper’s arms fell loose around her. “He kissed me,” she said, pointing at her cheek that felt as though it were a burning brand. “He said that he wanted to take over the town and make all the weird stuff obey him and that he wanted me to be his queen.”

“What did you say?” asked Dipper, and Mabel curled up into a ball on the kitchen chair.

“That I’d _think about it_!” she cried. “I don’t _want_ to be his queen or make _anything_ obey me, I just want to get away from him and be with my friends!”

“Shush, sweetie, it’s okay,” Grunkle Stan murmured, patting her shoulder. Dipper began to hug her again, and she wanted to cry even more because her family was trying to help but she was so scared! Stan kept talking. “Mabel, it’s okay that you said that. You needed to get away from him, and saying that was the easiest way.”

“But he’s gonna come back,” she replied, her voice quavering.

Grunkle Stan stood up. “No he’s not. I’ll sort this out, and when I’m back I’ll make some dinner, okay?”

“Will it have sprinkles?” Mabel asked, her voice quavering.

Ruffling her hair, Grunkle Stan smiled. “As much as you want, sweetie.”

 

-

 

Soos had just got back from cleaning the Mystery Outhouse when Grunkle Stan came home with a bag of groceries. Stan had done a double-take when he’d seen his handyman, then shrugged and made his way over to the stove.

“Who wants hot chocolate?” he asked, and Mabel squealed.

Her face dropped a second later, and she asked, “Is Gideon gonna hurt us?”

“Nah,” he replied with a smirk. “I got you a nice new piece of jewellery, too, if you want it.”

“You got his tie?” she screeched, her mouth falling open in a wide smile.

“Well, yeah. Couldn’t have him runnin’ around with the thing he used to hurt ya, could I?” shrugged Grunkle Stan. “You can use it to defend yourself, if you want.”

Mabel threw herself into his giant, smelly, old man arms.

“Thank you,” she murmured in his ear.

Grunkle Stan laughed and ruffled her hair. “Anything for you, Mabel.”

He began to twitch, and Mabel fell out of his arms onto the tiled floor. She screeched, and Grunkle Stan looked down woozily, gaping like a fish, before collapsing next to her.

“Mr. Pines!” Soos screamed. He lifted the old man in his arms like a cradle as Dipper helped Mabel up, and together they ran to Stan’s bedroom.

Grunkle Stan kept twitching and groaning as Soos set him on the bed, then his eyes began to glow bright blue.

“Is he being possessed?” Dipper asked, holding Mabel’s hand.

“I dunno,” Soos replied, quivering. “I don’t know, this has never happened before!”

Mabel began to flap her hands anxiously, trying to remember anything that Six-Fingers might have mentioned, but it was all coming up blank. Maybe something she’d seen in his journals, or one of the notes in the library book that he probably wrote?

_Mind_.

That could help. Grunkle Stan’s eyes were dimming with the light and everything, but maybe the Latin words could help.

She rushed into her bedroom, thudding on the old floorboards and ignoring her brother and Soos’s cries of shock. She pulled the book out from under her bed and opened the front cover, where she’d put all of the papers. After a few seconds of searching, she found what she was looking for and sprinted back downstairs, clutching the paper.

“This might help,” she panted. “I… I don’t know, just hold his head or something. D-Dipper, can you read it?”

“I guess?” Dipper said, taking the note. They all placed their hands on Grunkle Stan’s forehead and Dipper began to read. “Um… Videntis Omnium, Magister Mentium… Magnesium Ad Hominem? Magnum Opus, Habeas Corpus, Inceptus… Nolanus Overratus? Magister Mentium! Magister Mentium! _Magister Mentium_!”

The world turned bright white, and all three of them screamed as their bodies dissolved.

For a few moments, there was a long, blank silence.

“Where… Are we?” Dipper groaned, rubbing his head.

Mabel opened her eyes to see the outside of the Mystery Shack in dark monochrome, while she, Soos, and Dipper were all in full colour. The forest was dim and empty, and a broken swingset creaked in the clearing.

“I don’t understand, where are we?” she asked. “Where’s Grunkle Stan?”

“Dude, is this like, inside his mind?” added Soos. “Because that would be so cool, dude. We could see what he really thinks of us!”

“Wow, Question Mark!” and unfamiliar voice yelled. It was high-pitched, buzzing, and highly annoying, even by Mabel’s accepting standards. “You’re bound to be right once in a while, I guess!”

A triangle popped into existence on the Shack’s porch. It was gleaming bright yellow; almost too bright for Mabel to look at directly. He was dressed up in a pretty dapper way, though, what with the bow tie and top hat.

“Name’s Bill Cipher!” it said, still in the same tone as before. “And you three are Question Mark, Pine Tree, and Shooting Star!”

“Get out of our Grunkle’s mind!” Dipper shouted at it.

It floated over to Dipper and circled him “Yeesh, relax! I’m only here because I needed to speak with you three! I mean, I’m a busy triangle! I’ve got my septennial sacrifice coming up!” It, or he, turned to address all three of them. “This Gideon kid asked me to mess up the Pines family, but I filled my end of the bargain ages ago! So I’m just here to meet you guys! Hopefully, I’ll be seeing a lot of you in the future!”

Mabel felt Bill’s cycloptic gaze bore into her, and she tried to flinch away.

“Anyway, now we know each other! That’s good, right? So when your family members fall into my dimension of pure nightmares, you’ll know that they’re in good hands!” He waved his cane in the air. “See you in your dreams!”

Mabel woke up.

 

-

 

“Wendy,” said Mabel when the gift shop was empty save for the two of them. “I need you to help me out.”

Wendy glanced at the security camera in the corner before nodding slightly. “What is it?”

“I need you to go into the forest,” she said. “There’s someone there who I need you to talk to. He was captured by the sídhe and he lives in the forest and he’s my friend.”

“Is this the reason that Stan caught you coming out of the forest?” asked Wendy. “Because he almost fired me over that. I don’t know why he didn’t, to be honest.”

Mabel’s brows furrowed. “I’m sorry! I didn’t know what to say so it kind of just came out-“

“Dude, Mabel, it’s fine!” laughed Wendy. “I mean, I’m talking to you now, aren’t I? And if you’re friends with that guy in the woods, then he’s gotta be a pretty cool person.”

“He treats me like a person,” Mabel acquiesced. “He doesn’t laugh at me when I don’t know things, he just explains them. He’s like another grunkle.”

“But less gross?” smirked Wendy.

Mabel shrugged. “One of the first things we did was discuss whether farts were physical or not.”

Wendy snorted. “Sounds like your kind of person. Anyway, what do you want me to say to him?”

“Ask him if he can talk to me about some guy called Bill Cipher. He was some weird triangle that showed up in Grunkle Stan’s head and said vaguely ominous things,” elaborated Mabel, flapping her hands. “But mostly, I just want him to talk to me again. Like, without him, I punched Gideon, helped Soos to get a girlfriend, and somehow became friends with Pacifica, but I’m still really worried about him! Like, in Tam Lin, the fae make a sacrifice to Hell or something, and Bill acted like the sacrifice was to him, and the sídhe here told me to tell him not to make Tam Lin’s mistakes and then he stopped me from visiting him!”

Wendy blinked. “Should I just tell him that freaky stuff has been going down and you need to talk to him?”

“I guess!” Mabel’s voice was an octave higher than usual, and she spluttered. In a lower tone, she continued, “He’s called Six-Fingers, or at least that’s what he calls himself. I made him a sweater, so you can use that for the toll.”

“How do you find him?” asked Wendy. “Is it, like, knocking on a particular tree or something?”

Mabel glanced around, baring her teeth in an awkward grin. “I just yell a lot while walking around.”

Sighing, Wendy said, “I’m going to look stupid, aren’t I?”

“Only to a nerdy old guy,” Mabel reassured her, patting Wendy’s arm. “Also an entire sídhe court. But mostly just the nerdy old guy.”

Wendy had accepted her fate, but after a week of going into the forest after work for hours, Wendy returned the sweater to Mabel and sighed.

“I just don’t think he wants to see anyone,” Wendy has said, shrugging helplessly. “I tried telling him about how you wanted to see him, but he never showed up.”

Mabel sighed, holding the plain red sweater in her arms. “It’s okay,” she said. “You did your best. Thanks, Wendy.”

“No problem, Mabes!” Wendy replied, grinning before her lips drew together. “Or problem, since there’s apparently human sacrifices happening in-“

“Three months,” Mabel sighed. “I’ve got three months to save someone who I’d only known for two weeks.”

Wendy squeezed her younger friend’s hand. “Hey, chin up, Mabel! I know that you can figure something out. You’re one determined kid, and if I can help in any way, then just hit me up.”

 

-

 

Mabel’s last attempt at sneaking into the forest had gone poorly, but Grunkle Stan had seemed weird when he found her. He was acting all hazy, like he was half-asleep, and instead of shouting at Mabel, he just asked her if she wanted to go to the diner and get late-night milkshakes with Dipper.

Mabel had agreed, because if she went to sleep she was certain that she would dream about Six-Fingers and Bill Cipher and the faerie court riding on as the bells chimed louder and louder. She’d been having that dream a lot lately. The red sweater felt like a heavy weight in her bag, though it was only a simple garment made from simple yarn.

Of course, when they had reached the diner, it was closed. This should have been clear from the fact that it was so late, Dipper hadn’t woken up to consent to late-night milkshakes and so was being carried around in Mabel’s arms, his vest and hat placed haphazardly on his gently snoozing body.

Normally, they would have just gone home, but Lazy Susan was still there, having an argument with the gnomes trying to steal her pie. She could have been sweet-talked into opening the diner again for a little while for milkshakes, no matter how inconsiderate it would be of them or making her wait even longer to go home, when a group of red hooded figures dropped a sack over Lazy Susan’s head and started to drag her away.

Before Grunkle Stan could give chase, he was knocked to the floor by Old Man McGucket, who had launched himself from the roof of the diner.

Grunkle Stan groaned in the dirt, and when the hooded figures had disappeared from sight, McGucket hissed, “It’s the Blind Eye! They did something t’ m’ memoribizzles!”

“We have to find them!” Mabel cried, punching the air and almost dropping Dipper. She began to run after the hooded figures, Old Man McGucket following, and Grunkle Stan moaned in the distance as he tried to stand up.

“Are you kiddin’ me, kids? I need my milkshakes!”

Mabel ignored him, turning a corner to see the hooded figures and Lazy Susan enter the Gravity Falls Museum of History. She’d only been there on Pioneer Day for twenty minutes or so, so most of the place was still a mystery to her. Thankfully, Old Man McGucket seemed to know his way around the building backwards, seeing as how he scampered through on all fours, rear end first, and still managed to keep on the tails of the hooded men.

Dipper had woken up from all the jostling, and Mabel had whispered “Mystery hunt, bro!” before he could speak, so he stayed silent as they skidded around to find an empty room full of eyes.

He clambered down from Mabel’s back and glanced around at the depictions of eyes across the walls before pressing the triangular fragment of a carved eye. The fireplace behind them slid open with the sound of grumbling steel.

Dipper and Mabel glanced at each other, then at Old Man McGucket, and walked through the newly revealed doorway.

The hallways were stone and draped with red curtains depicting a crossed-out eye. Mabel shuddered as her footsteps echoed down the corridors, reverberating a moment later, as though someone else was following them.

When they reached a doorway draped with the same red curtains, Mabel peered through the cracks in the fabric. The hooded figures had Lazy Susan strapped down in some kind of dentist chair and were pointing some kind of gun at her.

Were they going to kill Lazy Susan? Just for seeing a _gnome_? What was _happening_?

The gun fired.

Lazy Susan did not die.

Instead, she seemed clueless, and confused, but otherwise completely normal. Or, well, as close to normal as she could ever be. Gravity Falls tended to make residents a bit cuckoo.

“They have a memory gun,” she hissed to her brother and Old Man McGucket as the hooded figures – members of the Society of the Blind Eye, whatever that was supposed to mean – all dispersed as though they had just been having a polite business meeting instead of wiping a vulnerable old lady’s memory.

“What?” Dipper replied, his voice low. “And what’s the Hall of the Forgotten?”

“I don’t know, they took some kind of tube from out of the gun and then they put it in a vacuumy pipey thing!”

Mabel peered around the curtains again.

“Okay, they’re all gone,” she said, “so maybe we should go and, I don’t know, let’s take the memory gun so that they can’t do the mind-erasey thing anymore.”

“And maybe we can find-remember my memories!” interrupted Old Man McGucket. “I still don’t know what the good neighbours did to my keys!”

“Sure, let’s do that,” Dipper said, and one by one, the three of them walked into what seemed to be the Society’s main room.

They hadn’t locked the memory gun up or anything, so it was easy for Dipper to slip it into his vest and leave the box where they found it.

Next, Mabel plucked Dipper’s hat from his head and pushed it into the vacuumy pipey thing. After a second, it was sucked up, and Mabel began to chase after it.

“What they heck are you doing?” Dipper shouted, chasing after her.

“Finding the Hall of the Forgotten!” she had responded, stumbling over her own feet as she tried to look back to her brother.

Dipper sighed and rolled his eyes, veering a little off his path. “This had better be worth it.”

Mabel grinned as she opened a large wooden door to reveal a room filled with what must be hundreds of memory tubes, and a statue wearing Dipper’s hat.

“This was most definitely worth it,” Dipper said, retrieving his hat. “But seriously, what’s been going _on_ in this town?”

“The memory-erasing cult,” Mabel replied sardonically, her eyes hooded. “The memory-erasing cult might have something to do with it.”

“I sure think they might!” added McGucket.

What a weird, oblivious, sweet, amoral old man he was.

Dipper had been glancing around the room for a few seconds previously, but he suddenly rushed to one of the stone shelves behind the statue and yanked out a tube of memories.

“Ouch!” he cried, and Mabel ran over to him.

“What’s wrong, Dipnugget?” she asked, looking at Dipper’s slightly burnt fingers. “Oh. That’s what’s wrong.”

“I think that there were wires in there,” he muttered. “I don’t hear anything, though, so I might have broken it. But hey, we’ve found McGucket’s memories.”

“You’ve got my stolen brain thoughts?” asked the old man, looking up with a bright smile.

“Yeah, and I think that I can figure out how to play them,” Dipper said, placing the memory tube in a specifically-designed hollow next to a screen.

Immediately, the screen flickered to life, showing a sandy-haired man in his mid-thirties pulling at his hair. If his nose didn’t give his identity away, then the next words out of his moth certainly did.

“My name is Fiddleford Hadron McGucket, and I wish to unsee what I have seen.”

Mabel glanced to Old Man McGucket, who already looked entranced by the screen.

“About a year ago, I was called down to this town by a friend who was doing research into the anomalies of Gravity Falls. He asked for my assistance in constructing a transuniversal gateway, though the project never became more than a hollow shell. Instead, he had begun to wander the forest more and more often.

“I became concerned for my friend’s mental and physical wellbeing when he spent every day isolated from his work and humanity, but he always brushed it off and said that the forest was where the majority of anomalies were concentrated. When I reminded him of the portal that he asked for my help in building, he shrugged it off and said that he still needed to make plans.

“Well, one day I followed him into the forest, and I found that he was… Entranced. He was surrounded by a court of the fair folk, I daresay. They looked like everything and nothing. I could see everything, and at the same time, I was blind.

“So I created a memory erasing gun. If all goes according to plan, once I have used this, I will forget about the sídhe court that has taken my friend’s mind and preoccupied his thoughts. I will not cope with remembering them. I fear that I will lose my sanity otherwise.”

As the McGucket on the screen continued, Mabel was trying to reassemble everything in her mind.

Old Man McGucket knew Six-Fingers? Six-Fingers was his friend? Six-Fingers was a _scientist_?

It felt fake, but then again, anything could be possible when there was a literal sídhe court a few yards from where you rested your head at night. Even poetry nerds being scientists.

 

-

 

“Bad news, kids,” Grunkle Stan said over breakfast. “Your parents want you to stay here until the New Year.”

Though she wanted to mourn for the end of her parents’ relationship and how messy the divorce proceedings were, Mabel simultaneously wanted to run on a rainbow. She could remain in Gravity Falls over Halloween. She could save Six-Fingers from being a sacrifice to Bill Cipher.

Dipper looked up from his cereal. “So we’re not going back to Piedmont yet? Are we going to school in Gravity Falls?”

“Yeah, I’m getting Wendy to enrol you, since she’s _stopped taking you kids to dangerous places without telling me first_ ,” growled Stan. “But Gravity Falls Middle School has an, uh, it has a problem.”

“Gideon,” Mabel muttered.

“Right in one, kiddo.” Stan munched on a large spoonful of cereal, swallowing in between words. “I, uh, I wanted to get Soos to go with you, because he’s basically a really big kid, but the school wouldn’t allow it, so I’m getting you both some semi-legal weapons. You still got your grappling hook, sweetie?”

Mabel pulled it out of her sweater, grinning. “I never leave it behind! I mean, ever since that time Gideon cornered us on the bridge and tried to push Dipper off, I’ve had to carry it around constantly!”

Grunkle Stan squinted at her. “That… That’s probably not what kids are supposed to do. Oh well!”

He took a large sip of apple juice and wiped his mouth on the back of his hand. Dipper stared at his cereal, smiling a little. “So we’re gonna stay with our friends?”

“’S what I said, didn’t I?” smiled Grunkle Stan. “And you can keep doing your weird mystery stuff if you stay out of the forest. I don’t want you getting sent back home in January looking like you’ve been murdered by a toaster or anything.”

Grinning awkwardly, Mabel said, “Yeah… Why would we do that?”

Grunkle Stan glared at her, snorting a little. “I don’t know, but I remember the ground after the milkshake disaster.”

Mabel began to laugh loudly, making breakfast simultaneously more and less uncomfortable for all involved. After she’d finished, everyone else had left, and she coughed up a bit of glitter before swinging her legs under her chair and thinking.

Before she could consider anything, though, Dipper called, “Mabel! Pacifica’s here to see you! For some reason…”

Mabel jumped out of the chair, giggling a little, and ran to the door.

Thinking could wait until after she’d told all of her friends the good news.

 

-

 

Nothing much happened throughout August, except for a road trip and an incident with a ghost, and while Mabel and Dipper’s birthday party was fun, Mabel found herself glimpsing Six-Fingers lurking at the outskirts of the woods. For a moment, he seemed to smile, but Mabel got swept up in Grenda’s huge arms and lost sight of him. When she tried to find him later, all that was left was a bracelet made of dried flowers and acorns, all encased in smooth, dirty glass.

It fitted perfectly on Mabel’s wrist, and she stifled a little mournful cry.

Why couldn’t he just _talk_ to her? He was in danger, and he was just leaving little gifts and going around his weird sídhe life like he wasn’t about to be a demonic nacho’s sacrifice!

Noticing her distress, Pacifica pulled Mabel back to the main party, where Candy and Grenda were tearing up the dancefloor with Wendy far too literally. Thankfully, the dancefloor was a patch of grass, so it would probably grow back.

Gompers and Waddles were being cute petting farm animals together, and eating people’s unattended food. Or rather, Waddles was eating the food, but Gompers was doing quite well with the paper plates.

Wendy’s teen friends were hanging out with Dipper, but Robbie and Tambry seemed to be more focused on each other. Mabel congratulated herself for a well-made match, and glanced at Pacifica, who squeezed her hand.

“Hey, it’s going well, okay?” she smiled. “I go to the same school, and so do Candy and Grenda. We’ll look out for you.”

Mabel smiled back, even though the school thing with Gideon was one of the few things that wasn’t ridiculously terrifying about the next few months. She meant, she had a magic telekinetic amulet, a grappling hook, and some rhinestone-studded brass knuckles from Grunkle Stan. The sídhe and the divorce and Bill Cipher’s septennial sacrifices or whatever was what was really scary.

“I know,” she replied, instead of saying any of that. “I trust you guys.”

“Dance with me,” Pacifica blurted, before blushing a deep red. “I mean-“

“No, it’s okay! I mean, yeah, I’d like to dance with you,” Mabel replied, grinning.

It was more of an awkward shuffle from side to side, holding onto Pacifica’s shoulders just behind the porch, but Mabel found that she didn’t care as she finally relaxed for the first time in days.

That night, she dreamed of a shrill voice speaking her name.

 

-

 

School was rather fun throughout September, for what it was. Sure, there was all of the boring stuff like lessons, but Mabel had Candy and Grenda to be weird with, and if anyone tried to make fun of them, Pacifica would be on the case with her inexplicably popular and mildly affected snobbiness. Dipper mostly hung around with Mabel, but she began to see him bond with other people as well! Like, there was this one guy who was kind of built like a blade of grass being bullied, and Dipper punched the bullies in the face like how Grunkle Stan taught him and Mabel to!

That was really cool and awesome, but Mabel thought that he should stick to using little rubber band catapults, because he could get really mathish and figure out how to hit several people using one rock that would bounce between heads and walls. Then again, punching was _really_ useful.

So Dipper was in detention, Pacifica, Grenda, and Candy had gone home, and Mabel was waiting for her brother. She was supposed to be alone, sitting on the end of the scarf she was working on as she waited for Dipper to be released, but she should have known that it wouldn’t last.

“Well, hello, darlin’!” a horrifically familiar southern voice said.

“Gideon,” Mabel growled. “Didn’t Grunkle Stan tell you to leave me alone?”

“Not really,” he sniffed. “He grabbed me by the hair, tore off my tie, and threatened me with bodily harm if I ever tried to do touch you again.”

Mabel continued knitting. “Go away.”

“He didn’t say nothin’ about talkin’ to y’all, my love,” Gideon smiled, sitting down next to Mabel and shuffling close enough that she could feel his breath on her cheek. “And I won’t touch you if you don’t touch me.”

Curling in on herself, Mabel tried to ignore him, but she could hear him shifting and pulling something out of his bag. The familiar smell of candy shrimp and pine needles filled her nose, and for a second, Mabel thought that Six-Fingers had finally come to talk to her.

But he was bound to the forest, and a moment later, she saw a gleam of gold and red from the corner of her eye. Her head whipped around quickly enough to see the cover of Six-Fingers’s second journal as Gideon opened the book.

“Where did you get that?” she hissed.

Gideon laughed. “Oh, I just saw it lying around when I was taking a walk around the forest! The faeries live there, and they chose me, Mabel. They chose me to have power, and your uncle, if he really _is_ your uncle, took it away from me!”

“It’s not yours!” shouted Mabel standing up and packing her knitting away into her bag. She slipped on one of her knuckledusters while she was at it; he might come into close range and she’d have to protect herself properly. “It’s not yours, and it never will be, because you stole something from the sídhe! You owe them now! They’re gonna take something big from you, I know it!”

“Oh, Mabel, you know what they say,” giggled Gideon, as he stood, and the sound made her stomach clench in loathing. “Finders keepers-“

Her hand flew to the amulet that hung under her sweater on a thread of pink yarn. “Losers weepers,” she finished, tearing the book from his hands. She hugged Six-Fingers’s journal to her chest, as though he could feel her through it. “I’m going to give this back to him, and you are going to leave me _alone_.”

“Very well,” he sniffed, trying to look uncaring and powerful, but failing due to his short stature. “You’ll come back to me soon, my queen, and when you do, I’ll forgive you.”

He stormed off, though it was more of a glorified waddle, and Mabel glared at his back until he disappeared from view.

A few minutes later, Dipper emerged from the room where detention was being held that afternoon. Mabel headbutted him gently on the shoulder, not wanting to loosen her grip on the journal, and Dipper ruffled her hair for a moment before they broke apart.

“Did anything happen here?” he asked. “It was kind of muffled from in there, and Mr. Ikaw didn’t want to go outside to check because apparently I’m now a problem child and can’t be left alone in a room.”

Mabel sighed. “It was Gideon.”

Wrapping his arms around his sister like some kind of affectionate vice, Dipper asked, “Are you okay? Like, he didn’t try anything, right?”

“Are you kidding? I sorted him out,” Mabel smirked. “I gave him a taste of his own telekinetic medicine. Well, not really. I stole a book that he stole.”

“Is that what it is?” Dipper asked, breaking the hug and tapping the journal. “I kind of wanted to ask, but I didn’t know if you’d been committing library theft again and wanted to boast about it to me and Stan at the same time.”

Mabel shook her head and began to lead Dipper out of the school corridor. “Nah, it just belongs to a friend.”

“Who?” questioned Dipper, and Mabel froze for a moment.

“Er, just somebody. You don’t know him,” she replied eventually, opening the door to the schoolyard with her elbow.

Dipper raised an eyebrow. “ _Should_ I know him?”

Mabel shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s not what you’re thinking, though. He’s not like Gideon, he’s more like Candy.”

“As long as you’re not getting hurt,” said Dipper, placing a hand on her shoulder. “Because if you do get hurt, then I’ve got Wendy, and Wendy’s got the gnomes.”

She snorted with giggles and nuzzled her head against Dipper’s shoulder. “Nerd.”

“Anyway, it’s one month to Halloween, so to you want to go trick-or-treating again?” Dipper eventually asked as they began to walk home.

Mabel’s eyes widened. “What?”

“Um, I thought you’d be excited about it,” Dipper shrugged. “I mean, I wouldn’t mind free candy again, and this time we won’t have to risk our lives.”

“I just didn’t realise it was so soon!” Mabel said quickly. “I haven’t even started planning our costumes!”

“Yeah, it’s been busy, hasn’t it?” laughed Dipper, buying her white lie.

If the sídhe made their sacrifice on the night of Halloween, then Mabel had one month to find Six-Fingers and figure out a plan. Thankfully, the journal might finally help her to find him.

“I mean, we can think about it later,” Dipper said. “Right now, I just want to go home and get a snack.”

 

-

 

Finally being given more than a minute alone, Mabel sat on her bed and opened Six Fingers’s second journal. She had had it for just over a week, but Dipper or Grunkle Stan was always hanging out with her, which was great, but she needed a few minutes alone sometimes, and nobody could figure that out.

At least her and Dipper’s Halloween costumes were going well. So far, she’d considered going as the night sky, because of her shooting star sweater and Dipper’s birthmark, and for some reason Dipper had agreed right away. He was probably just glad that Mabel wasn’t too stressed about the encounter with Gideon. He didn’t know that the journal was what had kept her so calm about the whole ordeal.

It smelt just as she remembered it, and some of the pages were so familiar that she could hear them in Six-Fingers’s voice, but at the same time it felt _different_. Maybe it was just because she was alone while reading it, but Mabel felt her chest tighten as she read each anecdote on each creature.

_One day_ , the journal read, _I was researching in the forest, as per usual, when I found myself in front of the Sídhe Queen! I had done nothing to cause this to occur, and upon her court’s laughter, I realised that this must be some kind of practical joke. One of her court, who calls themself Ceatha, told me that anyone in the forest can be summoned by anyone else who knows their true name. This leads me to believe that everyone I have spoken to here has been giving me false names! This was certainly true for Ceatha, though I have not tested this theory with anybody else’s name. No wonder everyone here calls me Six-Fingers instead of Stanford Pines!_

Mabel beamed. This was her answer to finding him! Or, at least, it would be. The fact remained that she only knew her friend by the name Six-Fingers.

She picked up the other book on her bed – the tome filled with Child’s Ballads – and opened the front cover. There, amongst the notes in Six-Fingers’s handwriting, was the photograph that she had discovered in the abandoned room. Mabel stood up, hiding the journal under her pillow, and left her bedroom.

Grunkle Stan would know. He would tell her.

She trod down the stairs and into the living room, where Grunkle Stan had fallen asleep in front of an episode of Baby Fights. He snored quietly, and for a moment Mabel began to wonder if it was worth waking him up over a mysterious photograph and the man in the woods. She shook her head. Of course it would be worth it. Six-Fingers was as good as family, and Mabel would do anything for her family.

She turned off the television.

Grunkle Stan snorted awake at the sudden lack of sound. “Wha- Who is it? I swear, I didn’t do it!”

“Grunkle Stan, who did the empty room belong to?” asked Mabel, standing in front of him and holding the photograph behind her back.

“W-what secret room?” he responded. He folded his arms and glanced to the side. “I don’t know anything about any secret rooms.”

Mabel sighed. “Yes you do. Soos found it in the summer. There was an owl calendar and a load of glass pyramids and a body-changing shag carpet.”

“Fine,” Stan grunted. “It’s mine. Can I go back to sleep now?”

“No!”

Grunkle Stan’s face reflected the shock that Mabel felt at her own vehemence. Well, there was no going back now.

Mabel brought out the photograph. “Grunkle Stan, this isn’t you.”

He opened his mouth to speak, and Mabel could see how quickly he was trying to explain it all away. It would be useless, though, so she interrupted him before he could say anything.

“This is Stanford Pines, isn’t he? He’s not you, because he has six fingers and a cleft chin and those aren’t things that you can just get rid of without a trace,” she said.

Grunkle Stan shook his head, less like he was disagreeing and more like he was somehow _scared_.

“Please, Mabel, I didn’t kill him! He went missing, he’s in the forest, and I’m going to get him back! You have to believe me, _please_ , he’s my _twin_.”

His voice cracked on the last word, and he began to cry. Clumsily, he pulled off his glasses to wipe away his tears, revealing brown unclouded eyes that were nearly identical to Six-Fingers’s. Or Grunkle Stanford, Mabel supposed. Six-Fingers was part of her family!

“I… He… I was living on the street, mostly, but when I was living someplace kind of stable he asked me to come to him, and I did. He’s my twin, I couldn’t not have. But he gave me this book, and pushed me out of the door and told me to take it far away, and I snapped. He… I wanted to be his brother again, and we fought, and at some point he was in the forest, and then he disappeared. He wasn’t there and I’ve been trying to find him ever since. Please, Mabel, I swear!”

“I believe you, Grunkle Stan!” Mabel cried out.

He was squeezing his hands together against his chest, and his fingers were wriggling and scratching at the opposite wrists. She wrenched his hands away so he was hugging her instead. The photograph fell into Grunkle Stan’s lap as he sobbed into Mabel’s hair.

“It was my fault,” he choked out. “He went into the forest and he never came out. I failed him. I failed you. You could have disappeared, or Dipper, or Wendy, and I’d never have forgiven myself. Please, Mabel.”

She hugged him closer as he began to rock backwards and forwards. “Grunkle Stan, I trust you. You’d never let any of us get hurt, not if you could do something about it. And neither… Neither would Grunkle Stanford.”

The last few words were lost on Stan, and he held Mabel against his chest and wailed, his eyes drying up as he ran out of tears to shed.

“Stanford Filbrick Pines,” he croaked after an hour. “He… He was the oldest. He was the smart one. He got Dad’s name. I dragged him down. I failed him. I’ll save him.”

 

-

 

Mabel strode into the forest, holding a huge bag of jellybeans and the second journal. Her little legs carried her over a subconscious path of broken twigs and newly-fallen leaves as the wind gently caressed her face with a chilly breeze.

She didn’t know why she was walking so far into the woods. In theory, the summons would have worked anywhere, but instead she was trying to find that bright, sparkling clearing again. It felt right, somehow, even though she didn’t exactly know where it was, and even though she had forgotten what, exactly, it looked like.

Nevertheless, she would find Six-Fingers. Grunkle Ford. They both meant the same thing, now, but neither was his true name.

As she kept walking, the scent of candy shrimp grew stronger, and the colours of the forest changed in shade little by little, and her steps became lighter and faster until she was sprinting to the fallen log that she had once rested against with Dipper, and had many times sat upon with Ford.

She clambered onto it, knocking a little bit of teal moss onto the ground, and called with a clear voice, “Stanford Filbrick Pines!”

In a breath, he had flickered into existence before her, wearing his green turtleneck sweater and the trenchcoat.

“Mabel?” he gasped. “I told you to never come back!”

“I brought you your journal and some jellybeans. In exchange for them, will you protect me and talk to me for a bit?”

Ford stuttered. “I- Yes? Wait, kid-“

“Too late, you agreed!” Mabel beamed. “You get me for a while! Yay!”

She settled down on the log, and after a moment, Grunkle Ford sighed and joined her.

“Why didn’t you tell me you were my Grunkle?” Mabel asked, swinging her legs and leaning against his shoulder.

Ford munched on a jellybean and swallowed before answering, “I didn’t want you to get attached to me, I suppose.”

Mabel laughed into his arm. “That… Yeah, that didn’t work out.”

For a few seconds, Grunkle Ford laughed too, but his face quickly became sober. “I didn’t want you to try and rescue me,” he said, staring at his hands. “I, well, I know that I’ll be this year’s sacrifice. Bill Cipher had appeared to me in my dreams over thirty years ago, and had convinced me to build a portal, but the sídhe told me of his true plans to open a hole between his dimension and our own. They didn’t mention that they gained the energy to keep this forest as their dwelling place from sacrifices to Bill.”

“Why didn’t you want to be saved?” asked Mabel, and Grunkle Ford looked at her with eyes that Mabel couldn’t decipher.

“I hope that you never understand,” he murmured.

“If you hope I don’t, I hope that too,” Mabel said. “But, Grunkle Ford, if I wanted to save you, would you let me? I’d take you home and you could make up with Grunkle Stan and you could be nerdy with Dipper.”

Grunkle Ford closed his eyes and smiled. “I’d… I would like that very much, Mabel.”

Mabel squealed and latched onto Grunkle Ford’s arm. “Yay! We’re gonna be a full family!”

“Hopefully,” smiled Grunkle Ford. “There’s always a chance that my hypothesis could be wrong, and that something bad could happen.”

“It won’t, because I’m going to win,” she grinned in response. “Are we going to Tam Lin you out of here? Like, at midnight and everything?”

With a loud laugh, Grunkle Ford said, “That’s the idea, my girl!”

“Where am I supposed to tackle and hug you?” asked Mabel, drumming her right hand’s fingers across her thigh.

Ford’s expression darkened. “Not far from here, to the west, there is another clearing. All of the trees have eyes, and…” He took a moment to swallow, even though he hadn’t been chewing a jellybean. “That’s where the sacrifice takes place.”

“I guess that we can call it Eye-les Cross!” Mabel snickered. “Because, you know, Miles Cross?”

Ford chuckled and said, “I’m pretty sure that the sacrifice in Tam Lin took place somewhere else, though I might be wrong. Crossroads were usually said to be satanic in folklore.”

“Well, we’ll never know,” said Mabel. “Janet saved Tam Lin because she was in smooch-love with him, and I’m going to save you because you’re my family, and family is stronger than _anything_.”

 

-

 

After hours of painstakingly stitching each silver sequin onto various black garments, Mabel had finally finished her and Dipper’s Halloween costumes. Dipper’s hair was gelled back and his birthmark was decorated with silver glitter on each star, while Mabel had a sparkling silver shooting star on her black hairband. While Dipper wore a three-piece suit with a shimmering ribbon for a tie, Mabel’s dress came to just above her knees and was puffed out with a ridiculous amount of taffeta petticoats. Her cheeks sparkled with all the glitter that she had applied, accidentally and on purpose, and her amulet was hidden beneath her high-necked collar.

“Are you ready to go?” Dipper asked, picking up their sparkly treat buckets.

“Let Grunkle Stan take a picture first!” Mabel laughed, pointing Dipper to look at the camera.

He squinted as the flash went off, and Grunkle Stan laughed. “Don’t worry, kiddo, I’ll turn it off for the next one. Soos! How do I turn the flash off?”

“Leave it to me, Mr. Pines!” Soos said, dressed as a sexy ghost.

“Sheesh, I keep on forgetting how uncomfortable your objectifying outfit makes me feel,” said Grunkle Stan. “You’re going to put on a jacket or something before you go out, right?”

“Sure thing, Mr. Pines!” Soos grinned, handing the camera back to him. “Okay, little dudes, smile!”

Dipper and Mabel struck a pose as the shutter sounded, held it for a second, then collapsed into giggles.

“You look so dorky when you try and look cool!” Mabel snorted.

“So do you!” jabbed Dipper, giggling like a child. “See you soon, Grunkle Stan! Love you!”

“Yeah, I love you too, Grunkle Stan!” Mabel said, hugging him briefly.

“Me too, Mr. Pines!” Soos said, wearing Stan’s old biker jacket.

“Yeesh, you’re all coming back in a few hours,” Grunkle Stan said, though he was blushing a little. “Now scram! Go get your free candy!”

Dipper and Mabel were doing pretty well with their twins act, and when Wendy, Grenda, Candy, and Pacifica joined them and Soos, they began to get more and more sweets. Eventually, everyone’s buckets were overflowing, and Pacifica started to give everyone else her candy.

“My parents will kill me if I come home with all of this,” she said. “They think that I’m at their fancy Halloween party, but everyone’s wearing masks and wigs. They have no clue that I’m partaking in this ridiculous commoner ritual.”

“You love it, don’t you?” grinned Wendy.

“It’s the greatest thing _ever_ ,” Pacifica nodded seriously.

While everyone was distracted, Mabel checked the time on her phone. Grunkle Stan wouldn’t expect them home until half an hour later, at quarter to midnight, so Mabel had to make her escape now.

She hoped that they wouldn’t worry too much as she ran towards the forest.

 

-

 

Never before had the woods been so dark.

Mabel could have sworn that earlier, the moon and stars were shining bright, but now that she was in the forest, everything around her felt crushing in the complete darkness. She held her arms in front of her, and her fingers brushed against twigs and leaves as she did her best to follow the smell of candy shrimp.

She’d never really figured out why the more magical parts of the forest smelt all sugary like that. It would make more sense for it to smell of strange flowers, or burning sandalwood. Now that she thought about it, she should have asked Grunkle Ford as to why that was.

She couldn’t worry about that now. A sparkle caught her eye from up ahead and she stumbled over a branch while heading towards it. Her legs and arms felt out of sync with each other, like a jumping VHS tape. The only constant was the chilling, constricting numbness of the air around her, numbing her fingers and lips and toes. She was strong, though. She was real. She was Mabel Pines, and she was going to rescue her Grunkle.

The world lightened a bit, and Mabel sighed as she realised where she was. This was Grunkle Ford’s clearing. From here, she only had to head west, wherever that was.

It was at that moment that Mabel finally realised that she had no idea as to where the cardinal directions lay. She could always choose a random direction, but that could mean life or death. She would have to follow the sídhe as they passed through. They had to pass through here! It was so magical!

And the bells. The ballad said that the sídhe court would have bells. She’d be able to hear the fae and get Grunkle Ford and everything would be okay.

Mabel couldn’t move. Her throat began to choke out weak words to a barely-there tune.

“ _Janet stood, with mind unmoved,_

_The gloomy heath upon,_

_And louder, louder rang the bells,_

_As the fairy court came riding on._ ”

There it was. The sounds, echoing closest to her left, began to grow closer. The bells rang, and a hundred horses’ hooves clopped against the ground, carrying their hundreds of unearthly riders and their stolen sacrifice, Grunkle Ford.

Mabel found that her legs would move and she dived behind the log as the sídhe court broke through the trees. Three hundred black horses passed in hours and a moment, and five hundred black horses an instant later. Mabel’s arm twitched as a milky white horse came into her vision, and she launched herself at the rider.

Grunkle Ford shouted, and Mabel distantly registered that she should have been somewhere else entirely instead of the clearing, but she had him now, and she could only hope that she could salvage this night and her uncle’s life.

He shifted through different shapes in her arms, and his trenchcoat fell off while his green sweater tore apart. Her grip adjusted in order to better hold the wolf that he had become. His matted brown fur stank of sweat and blood, and Mabel winced against his howls, but she did not let go.

“ _Hold me fast and fear me not_ ,” Grunkle Ford had sung in June, as Mabel had slapped out a messy rhythm on her thighs, entranced by his song

Next, he transformed into a swan, and Mabel held him firmly but gently against her chest, even as he thrashed and scratched her with his beak. She whispered his name to him, soothingly murmuring “Grunkle Ford, Stanford Pines, Six-Fingers, Grunkle Ford,” over and over again, though the words were fumbled clumsily over her lips that were numb with cold.

The swan began to heat up and grow. Its wings narrowed and elongated, and its legs grew until they were kneeling on the ground. In moments, the swan had become a rough humanoid form made of metal that glowed red with burning heat.

Mabel forgot all about Tam Lin. The version of Tam Lin that Grunkle Ford sang was gentle. She knew that the creatures differed between different versions, from snakes to newts to bears to lions, but the third step was always to transform into another animal.

The boy only became fire in _The Faerie Oak of Corriewater_.

His sister had let go of him, hurt by the fire, and he was taken from her forever. The girl in the song burnt to death, but Grunkle Ford wouldn’t hurt Mabel. He wanted to keep her safe, and he loved her, and she loved him in return. She was Mabel Pines, and nothing would keep her from her family!

She loved fairy tales like Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty and Snow White. Everything was always fixed by true love’s first kiss.

Mabel pulled herself to Grunkle Ford’s face and pushed her numb lips against his cheek.

His body dropped in temperature, and almost instantly his skin became both softer and rougher in her arms. His brown hair had turned grey, and his face was just as lined as Grunkle Stan’s.

There was one thing left to do.

Mabel reached under her petticoats and untied the red sweater from her waist. She pulled it over Grunkle Ford’s head and helped him into the rest of his clothes that were lost during his transformations.

“He’s mine now,” Mabel said, looking around at all of the sídhe that were watching, transfixed, by Ford’s rescue. “He’s my Grunkle Ford, and he’s a human, and he belongs with humans now. You can’t have him anymore.”

“You _idiots_ ,” a voice echoed, and a figure that could only be the Sídhe Queen stepped forth. “Who told this wretched girl to stay away from her sacrificial altar? Who allowed her to steal my prize over Bill Cipher? _Who did this_?”

“I did,” grinned Mabel, her braces reflecting the lights of the fae. She looked to her companion, who was squinting with undisguised joy, and asked, “Grunkle Ford, do you trust me?”

“Yes, Mabel,” he replied, smiling and deepening the laughter lines of his face. “I trust you.”

Mabel grasped the amulet around her neck and floated away above the forest, hand in hand with Grunkle Ford.

 

-

 

“Where have you been?” Grunkle Stan shouted. “Dipper and your friends came back worried sick! I think that Soos actually threw up, actually. But they said that you’d gone missing, and someone else said that they saw you going into the forest, and Mabel, _do you know what I thought_?”

Mabel smiled, tugging at Grunkle Stan’s sleeve. “That you had someone to say hello to again?”

Stan looked up, and he seemed to stop breathing.

“Hi, Stanley,” smiled Grunkle Ford. “It’s… I’m glad that I can talk to you again.”

 

-

 

As the first snow of December fell, Grunkle Ford said to Mabel, “The sídhe never captured you. How was that? They had your name.”

“Yeah, a bit of it,” she had shrugged. “Mabel Pines isn’t my full name.”

“Then you have a middle name?” Ford asked.

Mabel nodded, smiling and swinging her legs against the new couch in the living room, though she didn’t say anything.

“What is it?” asked Grunkle Ford.

Mabel’s smile became a grin as she looked up at her great-uncle, a mischievous glint in her eye.

“Janet.”

**Author's Note:**

> i have spent hours writing this. i haven't even edited it. i just want to rest


End file.
